jade As criticism mounted, he became ob- durate. In 2005, he appointed Farhad Rahbar-a hard-liner whose background was in intelligence-to head the P.B.O., which had been renamed the Manage- ment and Planning Organization, or M.P.O. One ofRahbar's first acts was to "retire" Tabibian from the institute he had founded. According to T abibian, Ahmadinejad told Rahbar that the M.P.O. was filled with economic liberals who would "spray' him with their color, gradually seducing him with their here- sies. These elements had to be resisted and purged, Rahbar was told. Rahbar followed orders, forcing many experienced economists into retirement. But, like his predecessors, he faced a bud- get whose shortfalls could not be ad- dressed with ideology alone. Rahbar started pressing Ahmadinejad to rein in the liquidity and embrace privatization. In due course, Rahbar, too, was fired. Through a mutual acquaintance, T abibian sent him a message. "I told him, 'It's not the people who spray-it's the building.' " In December, 2006, Ahmadinejad announced that he would disband the M.P.O.-the one government agency dedicated to solving Iran's economic problems. Bijan Khajehpour, an econo- mist who runs a business-consulting firm in Tehran, told me that Ahmadinejad was looking for a symbolic gesture that would tell the people he planned to stand up to the rich and powerful. "But he chose the wrong institution, because this was one of the longest-lasting establishments in Iran with at least some degree of study and planning," Khajehpour said. 'When you look at the department that replaced the M.P.O., it's called the Vice-Presiden- tial Department for Strategic Planning and Control. That word-'control'- shows you what Ahmadinejad is about." During the Rafsanjani era, many left- leaning student activists had bitterly protested the reforms that Tabibian pushed through. Yet, in 2006, when pro-democracy students demonstrated against Ahmadinejad, one of them waved a placard that read "Bring Back T abibian." T ehran's streets are dusty, dotted with buildings that are half built or half demolished, clanging with the wheelbar- rows of work crews. The joubs-deep roadside gutters for the runoff from the Alborz Mountains, to the north-are murky and littered. But under the Islamic Republic, Iran has become a modern country with few visible signs of squalor. All over the capital, commerce is brisk, from the upscale shopping malls in the north to the clogged passageways of the Grand Bazaar and the modest curbside shops of low-income quarters. Even so, many Iranians are enraged by the state of their economy. Not only do they complain about high unemployment and income inequality; they are angered by the pervasive cronyism and political corruption that reward the ideological faithful. Three decades of populism have won the Islamic Republic the fealty of the rural underclass, but at the cost of render- ing the educated middle class ineffective, unmoored, and nearly irrelevant to the , countryseconomy. A retired police commander told me that officers who, like him, had been trained in police academies under the Shah had been displaced and passed over for promotions in favor of ideologues who showed more zeal for enforcing moral strictures and dress codes. One night, a young carpet dealer whom I had met in the Grand Bazaar-in theory, an ideo- logical stronghold of the regime-tra- versed most of the sprawling, traffic- choked city to sit with me on a low retaining wall by the T ajrish River, a place where he felt he would not be overheard describing the repression and corruption of his workplace. "There are people in the bazaar who also work with the government," he said. "They are carpet sellers, but they pay no tax-they can export for free. The other group, which does not agree with the government, has a lot of problems." Mter elections, he claimed, police came around to check bazaarii' identity docu- ments for the stamp confirming that theyd voted. "If you did not vote, they decide you are in the group that dis- agrees, and they write down your address and everything. They can close your shop. What can we do?" Sometimes, the carpet dealer said, people from the tax office went around the bazaar asking merchants about their contact with foreign tourists and busi- nesspeople. "They look at information in our passport and they say, Why were you not in the war?' Then they want to know Why do these foreign people come to your shop?'" he said. "But we have to have something to eat! You can't sell carpets to Iranians, because they have no money." One Friday morning, outside a mosque in the working-class neighborhood of Narmak, where Ahmadinejad grew up, I met a young man who rented a nar- row basement apartment. He had been trained as an electrical engineer with a specialty in jet engines, but he worked in a tire factory and had not been paid in five months. "Because of the wrong policies of Ahmadinejad, our factory's door is locked," he told me. "I have two engineering certificates, but unfortu- nately there is no place for technocrats in this country." He had voted for Ah- madinejad in 2005, but he had come to believe that the President's economic policies were" a hundred per cent wrong." He echoed the credo ofT abibian: "Eco- nomic freedom will come together with political freedom." Young people in the run-down neigh- borhood of Naziabad, in south Tehran, told me that they saw no point in going to school. The best they could hope for, if they wanted to make money, was a life of crime. A neighborhood drug dealer said that he'd started selling methamphet- amine and hashish because it was a lot more lucrative than the textile business, which he'd worked in previously; with prices rising ever higher, he needed the income. Even in Naziabad, commercial space was selling for twice as much as it had a year earlier, in 2007. A neighbor- hood barber, Mojtaba, told me that he'd raised his prices a hundred and thirty per cent, just to keep pace with inflation. T abibian told me that such stories were typical: 'We have very high unem- ployment among educated young people. That is one of the failures of the govern- ment. And real-estate speculation has a drastic effect on income distribution. People without property are in an ex- tremely difficult situation." At a cramped real-estate brokerage, whose neon sign cast a harsh light inside, a samovar steamed in one comer and two middle-aged real-estate agents sat behind green desks, with a map ofT ehran tacked to the wall behind them. All over the city, the proprietor informed me, real-estate prices were twice as high as they had been a year ago. "Before Ahmadinejad, there was a steady market you could forecast," he said. "Since Ahmadinejad, the prices THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 2, 2009 37